Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo

Startling, facetious, lyrical, crude, difficult, angry—Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo is a rant, a raging tirade against most of the evils the world has suffered over the last few hundred years. With scathing sarcasm and outrageous metaphor, Goytisolo rails against Franco’s Spain and the Catholic Church, slavery, consumerism, materialism, totalitarianism, and imperialism, and above all, racism. But if this book were merely a catalogue of wickedness, it would not be the heart-breaking, funny, and extraordinary book that it is. Juan Goytisolo has written a book meant to disturb the reader and constantly keep him or her off balance, and, in that, he is very successful.

In this new edition from Dalkey Archive Press, shortened considerably from the 1975 original, Goytisolo seeks to explain his alienation from his country, his religion, and his language. The picture on the cover of a record album, some old photos, and letters from former slaves prompt the author’s thoughts about the sugar plantation his Cuban ancestors owned and the slavery that allowed it to flourish. That unleashes a torrent of derisive and mocking statements meant to castigate the Catholic Church for its subjugation of the people; for example, “do they know that slavery is a gift from Heaven and that idleness breeds sin?” and “slavery is the divine grace by virtue of which you will enter Heaven, immaculate and sparkling white.” The issues that drove Goytisolo away from Spain—a narrow-minded church, repressive government, intolerance, history of support for slavery, etc.—don’t resonate quite as much in the reader in 2009, as they must have thirty-five years ago when Franco was still alive and running Spain. But we don’t read Juan the Landless for its political insights, rather, one reads this remarkable book because of Goytisolo’s unique use of language.

To adequately express his outrage, Goytisolo created a new kind of novel, a style of prose that is more like poetry than prose. The sentences (lines, really) do not begin with capital letters, nor do they end with periods; some do not have both a subject and a predicate. Lines are separated by colons and run one after the other in long paragraphs, except when he decides to intersperse these paragraphs with individual lines, phrases or poetry. There are some sections that may be described as narrative but most of the text is essayistic. The richness of his vocabulary and the historic, literary, and geographic references make the reader’s head spin. Here is part of a section in which Goytisolo discusses his writing:

eliminate the last traces of theatricality from the corpus of the novel : transform it into an uneventful discourse : dynamite the worn-out notion of the flesh-and-blood character : replacing the dramatic progression of the story with clusters of text driven by a single centripetal force : organizing kernel of the writing itself, pen fountaining the textual process : improvising the architecture of the literary object not as a tissue of relationships ordered by time and logic but as an ars combinatorial of elements (oppositions, alternatives, symmetrical play) on the rectangle of the blank page : emulating painting and poetry at a purely spatial level : indifferent to the vociferous or tacit threats of the commissar-sergeant-customs-officer disguised as a critic : deaf to the siren songs of self-interested functional-content based and petty utilitarian criteria”

Goytisolo writes a great deal about bodily functions, secretions, and sex. Early on, he imagines a scene in which the plantation’s slaves are lined up to watch their owners, sitting before them on a curtained dais, successfully test a newly installed flush toilet:

a thousand fantastic rumors immediately spread across the plantation and the niggers will remain anxious and confused, peering in vain at her moving lips, unable to understand, down to their jungle mentality and scant notions of technology and theology, the celebrations of those who begat the creature, the new steam-engine, the wonderful water closet, now dancing for joy, tossing sweets to the children, hugging and congratulating them, while great-grandfather silently greets this luminous victory for the science of concealment, this sublime feat of engineering that further distances animal from human being, slave from sugarcrat, . . .”

To mock society’s prudish attitudes towards the human body, Goytisolo describes the struggle “the blessed child Alva-rito, whose process of sanctification in the Roman Curia already has the backing of eminent theologians and the active support of thousands upon thousands of devout religious and pious souls,” endures as Alvarito’s guardian angel and a serpent try to convince him to, or not to, defecate; the boy decides he’d “rather be dead than excrete!” to the great joy of Great-grandfather (God.)

Juan the Landless is a significant literary achievement, an often hilarious, and sometimes difficult to understand, commentary on religious and social intolerance. The dense writing, again like poetry, contains passages and phrases in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as historical and geographic references that I assume Goytisolo’s Spanish readers are familiar with, but I was not. Nevertheless, Goytisolo’s use of language is stunning. Phrases such as “images, that is, from those not-so-distant dead and abolished times when the rebellion let its hair grow long and its hurricane of hope shook the stunted existences of millions and millions of beings sentenced over the centuries to the ideological servitude that comes with your language, . . .” leave one breathless. It is easy to understand why Carlos Fuentes has characterized Goytisolo as “[u]ndoubtedly the greatest living Spanish novelist.”

Reviewed by Stan Izen

Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009
Paper, 163pp, $13.95
ISBN-10: 1564785270